


Can You Read the Second Line Down?

by Thassalia



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce Banner glasses appreciation, F/M, Gen, Vignettes, eyeglasses, minor Infinity War spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-13 00:51:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18021710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thassalia/pseuds/Thassalia
Summary: “You’re squinting,” she nods.  “You need a new prescription.”He takes the glasses off, examining them like they betrayed him, and says, carefully. “It’s hard to tell, sometimes.”





	1. Myopia

“There’s a solution to that,” Natasha says, leaning against the quinjet’s bulkhead and tipping her water bottle back. The electrolyte-infused water always tastes manufactured in a way that always raises her hackles. It’s still welcome; tramping through brush and up mountains is thirsty work, but it takes effort to bring the bottle to her lips when left unattended. She knows that no one tampered with the bottle, and sometimes it’s worth the self-test of drinking it anyway. Trusting that something she left behind in the jet will remain unaltered. That it’s Bruce guarding her things makes it easier, and that’s something else she’s trying to sort through.

“Hmm?” Bruce looks up from his tablet, glasses halfway down his nose.

She bites back the desire to push them up, to stroke along his temple, dig her hands into the unruly hair. He’d waited behind in the jet while she’d scouted ahead, and the shoved-up sleeves, messy curls, glasses askew betrayed his restlessness at her absence, despite his attempted poise.

“You’re squinting,” she nods. “You need a new prescription.”

He takes the glasses off, examining them like they betrayed him, and says, carefully. “It’s hard to tell, sometimes.”

She waits.

“I’m aging. The gray,” he pushes his hand through his hair self-consciously and she sets down the water, scoots a little closer, folding herself to sit cross-legged in front of him. He rests his elbows on his knees. “My eyesight still deteriorates, but slowly. I should need bifocals by now. And I don’t, but I still…”

“You reset,” she says, because they’ve talked around this, the ramifications of his altered genetics much as they’ve talked around her own enhancements without ever addressing them directly. “Just a little.”

He shrugs. “Been changing more than normal lately. It can take awhile for me to…feel at home again, after. Figure out what’s the same. What’s different.”

He shifts his gaze sideways at her, cocks a little half-smile so she doesn’t take it personally. 

She doesn’t. The training has been necessary, getting the Big Guy comfortable with her and vice versa, with the lullaby. With the ramifications of trust. It’s necessary. For everyone. What Bruce leaves unspoken are the years when he’d just had to make due, wear a prescription that was close enough, but not perfect, muddling through. They both know about salvaging what’s around them.

“I’ll help you pick out new frames, doc,” she says, and reaches to take the wire-rims from his fingers.

“I thought you liked these,” he says, a little sly, and it warms her.

“I do,” she says, and then fits them onto her own nose.

“You look good,” he says. “Studious. Professorial.”

“Mmm,” she muses, and thinks of all the variations of professor and TA they could play. “That’s why I like them.”

Heat rises in his cheeks but he keeps looking at her with that wicked half-smile. “But you still need something as a back-up, never mind being able to see with them.”

He makes a noise of half agreement, and she can hear all of the arguments he’s holding back, all the ways in which planning for the future feels like tempting fate.

She rises up on her knees, and he reaches out, a single finger sliding an errant curl from her forehead, tucking it behind her ear.

“They look better on you,” she says, letting her eyes cross as the prescription makes her head ache. He snorts a laugh as she gently puts the glasses back on his face.


	2. Hyperopia

Stark is making coffee in the kitchen. It’s a sure sign that he’s on edge. He never subjects them to his coffee when he’s upstate visiting, consulting, training. Whatever it is that he’s calling it these days.

He measures out beans, and grinds them, hot water already burbling in the electric kettle.

There’s a small white package on the counter. It’s addressed to Bruce.

Natasha resists the urge to put her fingers on his name. It’s foolishness, the idea that she would feel him closer to her that way.

He can’t be dead. She trusts in that, but it gets harder and harder to believe, since the alternative is that he’s just not contacting them. That the silence is as deliberate as his absence.

“I opened it,” Stark says, as the kettle clicks off and she carefully pulls the package towards her.

She flips it over and slides it open.

Two pairs of glasses spill out, heavy composite frames. She unfolds them, stares through the lenses.

“They arrived when we’d just gotten back,” Stark says, and she can hear the dark undercurrent in his voice. The loss he’s processing. “Got shuttled to the mailroom, then to R&D, and basically they got to Pepper’s office, and finally to her then to me.”

She keeps staring through the lenses until her eyes burn.

“I should have just thrown them out, “ Stark says. “But, well.” He shrugs.

“Yeah.”

She slips them back into the envelope, tries very hard not to think of Bruce modeling them for her, and still choosing the nerdiest ones in the batch. Except the package contained two sets of frames – the dark ones he’d chosen, practical and sturdy, and the other set that she’d preferred, a lighter tortoiseshell that enhanced his features instead of distracting from them.

“I can put them in the box of his things that we brought over,” she says, letting a little churlish annoyance curl around the words, a chore instead of burden. 

“It can’t hurt,” Stark says, stirring the grounds in the French Press.

She doesn’t ask why he’s sharing this with her, why they keep it between them like a dirty little secret. She already knows. And if she puts the package on her own desk instead of moving them into storage right away, it’s not like it’s hurting anyone.


	3. Astigmatism

It’s a strange juxtaposition – the neatly cropped hair and the raggedy suit, the open longing on his face and his twisting hands. But Natasha recognizes the uncertainty in his stance. He’s waiting for her, pretending he’s not.

Of course, it takes the end of the fucking world to bring him back. Of course it does.

She’s angry. She’s relieved. She’s so goddamned tired most of all.

Steve clasps Bruce’s shoulder, and there’s weight to it. She watches him shudder at the touch – relief, and sorrow both.

She doesn’t know what to say to him. Wouldn’t even know where to start.

And then he tugs the frayed cuff of his jacket down, thumb working against his pulse point and the gesture is so familiar to her, so painful that she needs a distraction from it.

“Unless Stark threw them out, there’s a box of your clothes in storage.” She sounds so distant, like none of this matters. Like it’s just another day. No fugitive status, or alien smackdowns, or unexpected returns.

“I…” Bruce looks at her, and she can see all these words bubbling up in him and she Just. Can’t.

She leaves them all there – Sam and Wanda and Vision. Steve, whose eyes she can feel burning into the back of her head because he’s just as much an old yenta as she is. Rhodes, who belongs here still.

She pauses in the doorway, and looks at him for answers.

“Far as I know, everything’s where they left it,” he says. “Banner’s stuff, anyway.”

Note then, don’t go looking for home in the compound.

She finds the box. She finds a number of boxes, actually. Her name is printed on the side of a stack in the corner. She doesn’t really have time to give in to curiosity, leaves it all behind.

Bruce shows up to lunch in his own clothes.

He’s quiet, talking mostly to Rhodes and to Vision. Their collective worry for Stark is palpable. His eyes flick to her over the platters of food, across the counter where she eats leaning against the snack bar and she meets them finally.

“I was gone a long time,” he says as the conversation lulls. “I never meant to be.”

It’s soft, directed to her, but he turns his gaze up to meet Steve who is leaning on the other end of the bar. “I’m so sorry.”

It’s so very Bruce to understand that his absence meant more than simply a disappearance. It hurts to see him bear that. Her anger dissipates, at both him and herself. They have both done what needed to be done to keep people safe.

Wanda and Steve clear plates and start the dishes. It’s a new part of her normal, both of them enjoying the ritual of washing up. Sam puts things away, running a stream of color commentary, leaving her to observe Bruce and Vision pouring through schematics on the coffee table.

Bruce rubs his eyes, squints and tilts his head.

“Dr. Banner,” Vision says, “Are you all right.”

“Fine,” he says. “I’m…fine. Just getting used to small print again.”

She knows that squint though, the lines around his eyes. Two years, he said. Two years as the Hulk. His prescription won’t have changed.

“Maybe saving the world would go better if you could read the directions,” she says. His mouth pulls in as Rhodes snorts and Steve sends her a sharp look.

“Maybe,” Bruce says, “But I think I left my glasses on another planet.”

“That’ll happen,” she shrugs, and he expands the font size and continues to squint and she thinks about those stacks of boxes.

She leaves, and returns a few minutes later, standing at Bruce’s shoulder. The search took less time than she’d anticipated. Whoever had packed her things had been meticulous.

He looks over, and she hands him a set of frames. He blinks a few times, then takes them, unfolding the arms, and situating them on his face, holding the earpiece like he’s searching for equilibrium, Finally, he looks down at the schematics and purses his mouth, swallows.

She moves to go back to the counter, and he catches her hand. It’s just a brush of skin against skin, but she wants to yell, to cry out, to hit him. It burns through her. She doesn’t do anything but look back at him, taking him in, the glasses dark against his skin, his eyes equally dark and burning, the angle of his jaw and the shape of his skull, and she fights against how much she’d like to cradle it against her belly.

“Thank you,” he says, earnest. Hopeful.

She gives in, for just a moment, because it’s all she can allow herself.

“I’m glad you’re not dead, Bruce,” she says, and squeezes his fingers before letting go.

 


End file.
